From Unilineal Cultural Evolution to Functionalism Essay examples -- e

From Unilineal Cultural Evolution to Functionalism Several anthropological theories emerged during the early twentieth century. Arguably, the most important of these was Functionalism. Bronislaw Malinowski was a prominent anthropologist in Britain during that time and had great influence on the development of this theory. Malinowski suggested that individuals have certain physiological needs and that cultures develop to meet those needs. Malinowski saw those needs as being nutrition, reproduction, shelter, and protection from enemies. He also proposed that there were other basic, culturally derived needs and he saw these as being economics, social control, education, and political organization Malinowski proposed that the culture of any people could be explained by the functions it performed. The functions of a culture were performed to meet the basic physiological and culturally derived needs of its individual constituents. A. R. Radcliff-Brown was a contemporary of Malinowski’s in Britain who also belonged to the Functionalist school of thought. Radcliff-Brown differed from Malinowski quite markedly though, in his approach to Functionalism. Malinowski’s emphasis was on the individuals within a culture and how their needs shaped that culture. Radcliff-Brown thought individuals unimportant, in anthropological study. He thought that the various aspects of a culture existed to keep that culture in a stable and constant state. Radcliff-Brown focused attention on social structure. He suggested that a society is a system of relationships maintaining itself through cybernetic feedback, while institutions are orderly sets of relationships whose function is to maintain the society as a system. Goldschmidt (1996): 510 At the same time as the theory of Functionalism was developing in Britain; the theory of Culture and Personality was being developed in America. The study of culture and personality seeks to understand the growth and development of personal or social identity as it relates to the surrounding social environment. Barnouw (1963): 5. In other words, the personality or psychology of individuals can be studied and conclusions can be drawn about the Culture of those individuals. This school of thought owes much to Freud for its emphasis on psychology (personality) and to an aversion to the racist theories that were popular within A... ...ture’, and as he reveals elsewhere, his conception of a social structure concentrates on ‘the political institutions, the economic institutions, the kinship organization, and the ritual life. Carrithers (1992): 12-33. However, Carrithers thought that Radcliff-Brown â€Å"displayed an orientation to diversity which in important respects is fundamentally similar to Benedict’s†. Carrithers (1992): 12-33. They both ‘took the natural sciences as a model of knowledge’ and thought that such knowledge could be applied to a culture occurring any place or any time in history. Carrithers goes on to note that Benedict, representing the school of Culture and Personality and Radcliff-Brown representing the Functionalists had their work criticized, and built upon by later generations of anthropologists. Eric Wolf’s criticisms of the functionalist approach can be seen as building upon the body of knowledge accumulated up to that time. References Anthropology 103 Text. 2000. Unpublished: University of Otago, Dunedin. Abbink, Jan & Hans Vermeulen eds. 1982 History and Culture: Essays on the Work of Eric R. Wolf. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis. Barnouw, Victor (1963) Culture and Personality.

The Impact of Weak System Security

In addition to this, it is not just the organization itself that can feel the brunt of the impact of weak security. Employees whose responsibility it is to ensure that there are no weaknesses an also be hit hard. Generally, it is up to managers to ensure that there are no weaknesses in a systems security; or at least to reduce the risk of negative impact/damage on the company. This means that if there is a major weakness is found in the system of an organization, managers could lose their jobs as a result of negligence etc.This then puts the managers in a situation where they are losing money, not just the company. Loss of Customers- Weak system security can also result in the loss of customers as people will not want to use a business that has problems with their security s their personal details or information may be at risk. For example, if a bank has a weakness in its security, and this weakness is exploited by hackers; then customers' information may be stolen and used to purcha se goods under their name.This goes against the organization's key responsibilities to its customers as they have a responsibility to keep their customers data safe and hidden from unrestricted access. This means that if people's data is stolen or lost then they will more than likely move to a rival organization where they think that their data will be safer. This will result in the loss of customers from the company and a massive lost in trust; possibly resulting in the loss of jobs as there aren't enough customers to make a profit for the company.Increased Costs- An increase in costs can also be incurred from the weakness in a systems security. This can be caused as a result Of needing a specialist engineer etc to come in to the company to see where the weakness in the systems security is. This may cost a lot of money as it is; and more money will need to be spent in order to get another specialist to come out and fix the problems that are there. In addition to this, customers may wish to receive mom sort of compensation as payment for the information that the company has lost about them. Or Image- A poor company image can be another nasty effect of weak system security. If a major company has even one or two system weaknesses it can reflect very badly on its image as people will start to lose trust in the overall protection that the company offers to its customers. A poor company image can have a massive impact on the ability for a company to make enough money to actually make a profit on the goods they are making/selling. A poor image may then result in the loss of customers and earnings from the many.It is therefore vital that the company ensures that there are no weaknesses in its security so that their company image stays strong. All of the above impacts can be related to the organizations key responsibilities to their Customers. The Organization has a massive responsibility to ensure that all of their customers' personal data is kept secure, and that o nly the people who are authorized to access it are able to and only at the right times. This links in with the data protection act of 1998, as companies must provide suitable means of protecting customers' data.

Planet of Slums Essay

As the sprawling sky rocketed buildings, and electrifying industries began to show the dreams of unlimited potentials, our eyes are yet to catch nasty travails of the urban life in all its vicissitude. 2005 was a witness to the ever increase in population in cities- expecting to reach 10 billion mark in 2050, but majority of them confined in the areas characterized by crumbling houses, dirty water, unhygienic environment, and very minimum sources and nothing in the name of social services, and ever increasing unemployment rate. These are slum areas of the urban cities where maximum of migrants from villages and small towns find their place. â€Å"Planet of Slums† by Mike Davis is an exploration of these dark corners of the most virtualized urban cities and, also reflects his deep commitment for raising our consciousness towards the real causes behind the unprecedented growth of these slum areas. He analyzed the grim view of this global phenomenon over the past half-century and what this billion strong slum population had in store for political future. From as far as places like Brazil to New Guinea, and from Senegal to Pakistan, rural folks are leaving their traditional occupation and landing in the slums of the urban cites for new growth and income opportunities in new occupational arenas. In countries like Africa and Latin America, people flocked to cities to escape from either the war or famine or got attracted by the income growth in factories producing clothes like t-shirts, sneakers, and toothbrushes never heard of before. Though the impact of migration process is being felt since the first industrial revolution, yet the conditions and the environment they have been staying in truly reflect their shattered dreams. They dream of getting rich but what they are gaining in cities like Manchester, Chicago, Tokyo and Mumbai are their unending lives in dirty towns and squatter camps. Guldin’s case study of Southern China exposes the point that it is not only the cities which are being developed but it is also the vice versa, â€Å"Villagers become more like market and xiang towns, and county towns and small cities become more like large cities. † (Davis 2006: 9) Many countries are also witness to the bubbling city lives reaching at the doorstep of the rural folks in their own villages or towns. It has quite happened in Malaysia where journalist SeaBrook highlighted the fate of several fishermen, â€Å"Engulfed by urbanization without migrating, their lives overturned, even while remaining on the spot where they were born. †(Davis 2006: 9) The lives of fishermen had all been uprooted by the new waves of urbanization, which cut off their homes from sea due to new highway, polluted their fishing ponds due to urban waste, and deforested the neighboring hillsides to construct apartment blocks. Johannesburg is one of the many cities, which is a witness to the degeneration of soil owing to continuous inebriated mining. More than half of the non-white population is surviving at informal settlements in areas where there is abundant of toxic waste and chronic ground. But the most classic case recorded by Davis is Mumbai in India, where the people earning higher level of income own 90 per cent of land whereas poor people are overcrowded. CBC News correspondent drafted a picture of the third largest city in the world after Tokyo and Mexico. Mumbai has 10 million people with majority of the population belonging to slum areas and the Dharavi at the vicinity of Mumbai is considered to be the largest slum in Asia. (Benoit 2006: Online) The lands where the slums are developed are the most valuable real estate areas but all are illegal and every day government vehicles come in one part of the slum areas or to the next for the demolition and every time they are established again. Several times, state had tried to enter into deal with private individuals for the redevelopment of the lands and for providing new houses for slum dwellers but this process has been unsuccessful. These slum dwellers are the backbone of the city Mumbai providing the labour for menial jobs like train operators, construction workers, factory workers etc. Davis said that, â€Å"These polarized patterns of land use and population density recapitulate older logics of imperial control and racial dominance. † (Escobar 2007: 27) Even though the economies of mega cities like Lagos, Kinshasa, and Dar Es Salaam have been deteriorating or remaining stagnant still since last many years, these cities have been continuously attracting new arrivals. Davis attempted to focus on the reasons behind the growth of slums that had been the matter of concern for economists since many years. The debt crises of 1970s and 1980s, and the restructuring of the developing economies in third world by International Monetary Fund during 1980s have been the main culprits. During the mid seventies, World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began to grant loans to the developing nations on the conditions of structural adjustment policies. The term denotes the changes in the policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank for granting the new loans at lower rate of interest to the developing countries with certain conditions. The conditions are levied to ensure the proper use of the money lended and to reduce fiscal imbalance of borrowing countries. The developing nations had to privatize their public services department and infrastructure, devalue their currencies, initiate in the growth of crops for exports, and remove the subsidies and this had a direct impact on the local farmers and manufacturers who were forced to enter into competition with the First World agribusiness and corporations. Davis evoked, â€Å"Rapid urban growth in the context of structural adjustment, currency devaluation, and state retrenchment has been an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums† (Davis 2006: 17). The World Bank and IMF became a part of the capitalist system in the international scenario subsequently supported by Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl (Davis 2006: 153). According to Davis, â€Å"Debt has been the forcing-house of an epochal transfer of power from Third World nations to the Bretton Woods institutions [World Bank and IMF] controlled by the US and other core capitalist countries [†¦] The [World Bank’s] professional staff are the postmodern equivalent of a colonial civil service† (Davis 2006: 153-4). The global forces with their weapons of the deregulation and mechanization of agriculture, and promotion of the consolidation of smallholdings into large ones created the surplus of rural labour forcing them to make the urban slums their final destination, as the job market in the cities became on the verge of extinction. In Davis own words, â€Å"Over-urbanization’ is driven by the reproduction of poverty, not by the supply of jobs. This is one of the unexpected tracks down which a neo-liberal world order is shunting the future† (Davis 2006: 16). It is not only rural folks but also import substitution industries, public sectors, and middle classes felt an impact. (Davis 2006: 16) Millions of city-dwellers were directly pushed into poverty due to Neo-liberalism. But along with this, the same policies that had shattered the small public sector enterprises gave boost to the private enterprises, importers, military personnel and many leading players controlling political circles. Besides undertaking economic consideration, Davis espouses upon the various social, religious, ethnic and political movements making their presence felt at the every corner of the dwelling of urban poor. For e. g. the resistance movement of Islam at the Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs dominating the streets of Cape-town and San Salvador, the movement Pentecostalism at Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary movement at Caracas and La Paz became hallmark of the new movement initiated by American regime as their war over terrorism. But this war was nothing but a setting of a stage of a long prolonged war between the American regime and the slum dwellers. Going with the UN-Habitat Report, â€Å"Challenge of Slums†, which went public in 2003, Davis emphasized the final aspect to the whole holocaust that lay behind the growth of an ugly phase of the urbanization. He cited the â€Å"Retreat of the State, as the main unfounded reason for the increase in poverty and unequal division of income and wealth during 1980s and 1990s. Davis 2006: 154) These state of affairs led to the development of the â€Å"virtual democracy, whereby all the control of the macro-economic policies of Third World nations are controlled from Washington. † (Davis 2006: 154) Adding to the cause also is the corruption among leaderships, institutional failures and structural adjustment programs that eventually led to the transfer of wealth from poor to rich nations. Besides, haphazard way of the developing of roads and increasing traffic beckoned the environmentalists’ towards the extensive amount of population and ever-growth of the rows of slums near the roadsides and railways tracks. Initially Davis was going to give title of his book, The World Is a Ghetto, but the motive of the writer was to bring to the notice of the world the changes that had emerged in the global scenario though appearing to be on the development side yet it is a false notion as amidst the high rise buildings, industries, hotels and restaurants, zooming vehicles on the road, there are darker corners we often ignore. These slums are posing the problems of imperial order and social control that began to come to the notice of geopolitics. In a deep ironic note, Davis says if America aims to leash out the terrorists into the social and cultural periphery, it would be making the poor developing cities as permanent battlefields. Planet of Slums is an eye opener for the world imperialistic orders to make them analyze the fact that no city can virtually grow on wealth alone.

Managing Information Technology Essay

Question #1: What would be your prioritized list of IT investments? Four IT investments need to be prioritized; 1. 2. 3. 4. Ecommerce & Web sales Aligning the various systems (legacy, SAP, ERP) together. Hire relationship managers Make IT a â€Å"partner† 1. After only 3 years, KL’s Web sales have reached $156M, equalizing its in store sales, and now represent 15% of total sales. This is very encouraging and exciting. KL needs to continue to invest in Ecommerce & Web sales in order to continue this great growth. Selling via the Internet should be a priority because it’s cheaper than your ordinary brick and mortar sales points, there is less overhead expense, and this market is growing exponentially. The company should work towards gaining the most market share possible developing an industry leading website, timely and dependable delivery, and customer service. Accomplishing the above means getting all the company sharing information and data more efficiently (see point #2). 2. KL has a complex IT infrastructure with various systems in use around the world. The result is a frustrated bunch of employees upset with the fact that communication data sharing is awful. To remedy this the company needs to invest more in training to get the whole company, including the USA, to use SAP as soon as possible. 3. Assign/hire relationship managers to improve information sharing, facilitate plans, priorities, communications, and relationships, and in turn get the whole system to work together. 4. To avoid such problems in the future, KL needs to make IT a â€Å"partner† in the decision making process. In other words, the company needs to better involve IT in company strategy and tactical planning. With the IT team, the company needs to develop and define an Enterprise Operating Model and Architecture that include business strategy, current IT assessment, IT strategy and IT plans. Question #2: Would your colleagues on the executive committee agree with your selection and prioritization? The above priorities should be well received because they solve or improve many of the frustrating employees around the company. This answer will look at each division (upper management, sales & marketing, order fulfillment and distribution, and ITS) and see why the four IT priorities should be well received by the executive committee. The KL upper management is on record stating that the company has IT challenges â€Å"†¦around coordinating the various, and at times conflicting, business priorities across the enterprise. We sure could use better IT tools for this as well as ready access to timely performance data.†, CEO Joseph Campbell. In addition, COO Jens McCreary stated that the company needs to improve global supply-chain management and leverage the expertise to outpace out competitors and cut our operating costs†¦Ã¢â‚¬  Considering these quotes it’s safe to assume that the CEO and COO should be accepting of these four IT priorities because will want to see IT provide better services in order to reach their goals. The products, manufacturing and distribution divisions of the company want to see SAP standardized and compatible across the company in order to better share information. Priorities #2 and 3 should please this division. Sales & marketing hope to see inter-operating unit and communications and coordination issues to be resolved and they need real-time data. Priorities #1, 2 and 3 should encourage the sales and marketing team. The order fulfillment and distribution divisions need capabilities to forecast sales and manage our product and cash flows need to be more competitive. They want to be able to deliver in a J.I.T. basis (optimize effectiveness) and have data integration between the legacy systems, SAP, Oracle, etc. These issues should improve with priorities #2 and 3 and this making these priorities acceptable to this division. Finally, the information technology services (ITS) claim that not spending enough on IT (more spent on production and sales), and Web and ecommerce should be priority. Priorities 1 to 4 all favor the ITS team, and therefore should be well received.

American Heritage Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 2

American Heritage - Essay Example employed to determine and govern the way that each of these aforementioned three actors can and should behave with relation to the tasks they were responsible for fulfilling and with regards to the level of cross jurisdictional activity that was allowed to occur between the two. It should be noted that although a powerful judiciary and/or legislature were feared as well, the ultimate fear that the founders had was with regards to the growth and over abundance of power that a strong executive might carve out for himself/herself. In this way, a secondary benefit of the separation of power can be seen to have an ancillary benefit of ensuring that none of the three becomes too powerful; however, the ultimate goal that was originally intended to ensure that the executive branch was not able to exact total control over the system. This was primarily born out of the fear that was a result of the means by which the colonists had experienced the full might and whimsical wrath of King George III. After having a far less than pleasant experience with the way in which a total monarch (the ultimate executive) could exhibit control over each and every aspect of life, the colonists and the framers wanted to ensure that they could create a system of governance that did not exhibit this particular flaw. By refusing the power of the legislature to enact law, by refusing the power of the executive to pass legislation, and by refusing the judicial power the powers associated with either the legislative or executive branches, the framers were able to create a system that most effectively represented the means by which checks and balances could be ensured between all three branches. By not making any one entity or individual ultimately responsible, the framers sought to create a medium of governance that would not perish by nature of its very inability to provide rapid and/or radical changes based upon the whims or personal interests of a single individual or a cabal of self

Popular Culture Movie Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Popular Culture - Movie Review Example Thirteen days movie is about interpersonal influence and decision making. It can also be reflected on narrative theory, organization, contextualized sequences of events which can be seen in case studies, classroom discussions of any management topics. This movie makes us to think about how decisions are made in organizations, where, and why. It involves strategy, critical reasoning and decisiveness to conclude on a holistic perspective. Strategic decisions are not event based in this movie but more on political views. The movie plot has uncertainties, intense pressures and unfolding of disastrous events which can happen in any management. When Kennedy is making decisions we can relate to the senior managements decision making policy which are mostly politicized than general reasoning. Contextual, temporal and processual factors play a key role in influencing decisions which mostly takes place in all organizations. There are key influencers who make the decisions and impose on the man agement. In October 1962, U-2 surveillance photos reveal that the Soviet Union is in the process of placing missiles carrying nuclear weapons in Cuba. These weapons have the capability of wiping out most of the Eastern and Southern United States in minutes if they become operational. President John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood) and his advisers must come up with a plan of action to prevent their activation.

Olympus corporation scandal 2011 and corporate governance failures Coursework

Olympus corporation scandal 2011 and corporate governance failures - Coursework Example counting standards for accounting investments , poor play by institutional investors , non-existence of strong take-over codes and the role of statutory auditors to certify the accuracy of company accounts (Tricker & Tricker 2014:176). This research essay will examine how Olympus Corporation was organised , will discuss in-detail about the prevention of such scams in future in Japan by suggesting suitable measures by strengthening the existing corporate governance codes of Japan. The Olympus Corporation (hereinafter will be referred as OC) scandal was related to financial reporting, which offers an opportunity to throw some light how both practical and theoretical issues were the causes for the reform in the Japanese corporate governance model. Japan’s continuous reluctance to appoint independent directors- the concept which was introduced in the U.S. on the pressures from global institutional investors in the 1990s was one of the reasons for the failure of corporate governance in Japan. The main aim of the corporate governance should address risk management and conflicts of interest instead of concentrating mainly on enhancing performance of the business (Schreck 2009:57). In the absence of independent monitors to make any probable monitoring of management, it is really not practical to make corporate governance more vibrant. A good operating environment would include updated information disseminations, strong implementation, especially through priva te litigations and entrusting active roles to external auditors (Woodford 2012:2). OC establi shed a tobashi scheme to transform its losses off the balance sheet of Olympus. A A tobashi scheme is a financial scam where the losses incurred by a company are camouflouged by an investment firm by transfering them between other fake or genuine clients or the portfolios. Cayman based companies were acquired by paying abnormal acquisition and management fees. When Michael Woodford, a British, who was appointed CEO of